Tags are keywords people use to describe their bookmarks
What is a tag?
A tag is simply a word you can use to describe a bookmark.
Unlike folders, you make up tags when you need them and
you can use as many as you like. The result is a better way
to organize your bookmarks and a great way to discover
interesting things on the Web.
Tags are also called tagging, blog tagging, folksonomies (short for folks and taxonomy), or social bookmarking.
On a website in which many users tag many items, this collection of tags becomes a folksonomy.
What is a tag cloud?
A list of tags where size reflects popularity.
Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata, typically in the form of tags that collectively and/or collaboratively become a folksonomy. Folksonomy is also called social tagging, "the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content".
In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.
Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders, although some services feature categories/folders or a combination of folders and tags. They also enable viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them. Some social bookmarking services also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks. (tag clouds).
Many social bookmarking services provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.
As these services have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing of bookmarks, web annotation, and groups or other social network features.
Founded in 2003, del.icio.us (now called Delicious) pioneered tagging and coined the term social bookmarking.
**Social Bookmarking** in Plain English Advantages: ·All done by human beings who understand content. (Software determines content algorithmically.) ·People find web pages not yet detected by web spiders ·Resources can be ranked on number of times it has been bookmarked rather than on number of external links ·Users can access a consolidated set of bookmarks from various computers, organise large numbers of bookmarks and share with contacts ·Useful for libraries to provide informative links to patrons
Disadvantages: ·No standard set of keywords (i.e., a folksonomy instead of a controlled vocabulary) ·No standard for the structure of tags (e.g., singular vs. plural, capitalisation, etc.) ·Mistagging due to spelling errors ·Tags that can have more than one meaning ·Unclear tags due to synonym/antonym confusion, unorthodox and personalised tag schemata from some users ·No mechanism for users to indicate hierarchical relationships between tags (e.g., a site might be labelled as both cheese and cheddar, with no provision to indicate that cheddar is a refinement or sub-class of cheese). ·Can be susceptible to corruption and collusion. The more often a web page is submitted and tagged, the better chance it has of being found, so to make their websites more visible spammers have started bookmarking the same web page multiple times and/or tagging each page of their web site using a lot of popular tags. http://infotangle.blogsome.com/2005/12/07/the-hive-mind-folksonomies-and-user-based-tagging/
Tags are keywords people use to describe their bookmarks
What is a tag?
A tag is simply a word you can use to describe a bookmark.Unlike folders, you make up tags when you need them and
you can use as many as you like. The result is a better way
to organize your bookmarks and a great way to discover
interesting things on the Web.
Tags are also called tagging, blog tagging, folksonomies (short for folks and taxonomy), or social bookmarking.
On a website in which many users tag many items, this collection of tags becomes a folksonomy.
What is a tag cloud?
A list of tags where size reflects popularity.Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata, typically in the form of tags that collectively and/or collaboratively become a folksonomy. Folksonomy is also called social tagging, "the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content".
In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.
Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders, although some services feature categories/folders or a combination of folders and tags. They also enable viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them. Some social bookmarking services also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks. (tag clouds).
Many social bookmarking services provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.
As these services have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing of bookmarks, web annotation, and groups or other social network features.
Founded in 2003, del.icio.us (now called Delicious) pioneered tagging and coined the term social bookmarking.
**Social Bookmarking** in Plain English
Advantages:
· All done by human beings who understand content. (Software determines content algorithmically.)
· People find web pages not yet detected by web spiders
· Resources can be ranked on number of times it has been bookmarked rather than on number of external links
· Users can access a consolidated set of bookmarks from various computers, organise large numbers of bookmarks and share with contacts
· Useful for libraries to provide informative links to patrons
Disadvantages:
· No standard set of keywords (i.e., a folksonomy instead of a controlled vocabulary)
· No standard for the structure of tags (e.g., singular vs. plural, capitalisation, etc.)
· Mistagging due to spelling errors
· Tags that can have more than one meaning
· Unclear tags due to synonym/antonym confusion, unorthodox and personalised tag schemata from some users
· No mechanism for users to indicate hierarchical relationships between tags (e.g., a site might be labelled as both cheese and cheddar, with no provision to indicate that cheddar is a refinement or sub-class of cheese).
· Can be susceptible to corruption and collusion. The more often a web page is submitted and tagged, the better chance it has of being found, so to make their websites more visible spammers have started bookmarking the same web page multiple times and/or tagging each page of their web site using a lot of popular tags.
http://infotangle.blogsome.com/2005/12/07/the-hive-mind-folksonomies-and-user-based-tagging/